Monday, October 12, 2009

In 2000, I put a geeky but otherwise seemingly innocuous joke on my personal bio page. Five years later, it kept a whole blog-forum full of Spanish-speaking websurfers puzzled, and I didn't even know it. Their discusson led me to discover something quite insightful.

I do not know any Spanish. Someone translated something I wrote into Spanish in order to quote me. Bizarre, but it gets better... I'll give you my original quote first:

When I break a wishbone, I wish that the other person get their wish, then point out why the wishbone or the Universe should have spontaneously ceased to exist.

This was intended to be a joke, and a self-contradicting logic scenario (like the philosopher who encounters a liar and a truth-teller at a crossing in the road). It turns out not to be a paradox at all (as my Hispanic readers pointed out; answer below). I used an auto-translator to render my words back into English:

When someone break a chicken bone of luck I ask is the desire to fulfill the desire of the other person. Then I can make the observation that either the bone, or the universe, should suddenly cease to exist.3

No, come, let us now more concern to us all: Do angels f***? that the having sex or not is secondary, what matters is what you do with it.

Along with all the above, and several other humorous references to subjects as diverse as Futurama, the Monty Hall problem, and chicken bones falling from the vastness of the starry night, was a serious discussion that resolved the "paradox" with various logic symbols, arrows and technical jargon. But such formalities are not really necessary, as the answer is quite simply stated:

The "paradox" is based on the notion that only one person can get his wish. But there is nothing that says that must be the case! If my friend and I break the wishbone, and both of us get our wish, then the universe and the chicken-bone can both be happy, to say nothing of me and my friend.

So I learned (in 2009) that (in 2000) I had failed to see the possibility of a win-win scenario, thanks to a bunch of writers (in 2005) whom I have never met.

Addendum: After writing the above, a friend replied:

Two more triumphs for [you]! Robert, you must know Jorge Luis Borges' brilliant work and also the notoriously disrespectful work of the pataphysics society.

In response I'll say the following:

I heard Borges' brain is being kept alive in Argentina, connected via various electrodes to a computer (like in the "Spock's Brain" episode of Star Trek) and is surfing the Internet while waiting for the Nobel committee to finally give him the Prize for literature... so maybe he instigated the discussion. Come to think of it, I don't ever remember putting that quote on my webpage.

The wishbone custom is based in metaphysics, because it involves a belief in something beyond the physical world (namely, a belief that the wish is granted by someone or something that is not explainable in the physical world)

If there were an actual paradox, then I guess it would be 'pataphysics. It definitely has the satirical element (-: However, as the Spanish blog forum points out, there is no actual paradox, because the wishbone belief does not say that the person with the short half of the bone will not get his wish.

So I think it's just plain old logic.

Footnotes

3 : An earlier version of the same auto-translation service delivered the following:

When breaking up with someone a chicken bone of luck-wish I ask is that it meets the desire for another person. Then I make the observation that either the bone or the universe, should suddenly cease to exist.